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Explaining the Righteous Mexican Standoff

You know what scene always works in movies? The Righteous Mexican Standoff.

Please do not confuse this with the traditional Mexican Standoff. In the traditional Mexican Standoff, all the participants are on equal footing. 

We are definitely meant to root for Clint Eastwood in the final standoff in The Good the Bad, and the Ugly. But it is still a traditional Mexican Standoff because of how it is shown, shot, and how it plays out. 

In the traditional form, we are either supposed to sympathize with both parties, even if one is a gangster and the other is a cop (The Killer), or we are supposed to sympathize with none of the parties, like in True Romance. In True Romance, the cops, mobsters, and Hollywood security guys find themselves staring each other down, but our hero (Clarence) isn’t part of the standoff; he’s just trying to navigate a way out the door through a hail of bullets.     

But in the Righteous Mexican Standoff, we go completely with the good guy, and it usually ends without a bullet being fired. 

Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, Deadwood, and a host of other (mostly westerns) give us the template for the RMS. The town, made up of either vengeance seekers or straight-up bad guys surround the law officer and demands that he give up a prisoner.

Instead, he pulls out his weapon, aims it at the mouthiest of the bad guy group, and says, “That’s not going to happen unless you kill me. And while you guys outnumber me, I’m going to get as many of you as possible on the way to the pearly gates. … Starting with you, mouthy asshole number 1.” 

And so on. The bad guys then, seeing that the law officer is serious and possibly insane, back down. 

Is this a thing that can actually happen in real life? I would say probably not. What’s to stop someone in the back of the group from letting one fly and seeing how things work out? 

But my mind is wandering in this general direction because I watched Wyatt Earp and then Tombstone back to back, and how they handled a similar scene is indicative of the successes and failures of those movies as a whole. 

If you were going to say, write a review that pitted both movies against each other this would be a good place to start. 

Ahem. 

The Standoff

The Righteous Mexican Standoff in Wyatt Earp is the last scene in the movie. Wyatt and his wife, Josephine, are on a boat headed to pan for gold in Alaska when a young man approaches him and reminds him of a time, in his salad days, when Earp saved his uncle’s life. 

The scene is meant to show a couple of things: 

1) That Earp has become a legend within his own lifetime. 

2)  That fame hasn’t brought him any material success. 

3) That even now, he is still wrestling with the decisions he made and the life he lived. 

It’s not a celebration of violence, or manhood, or of “taming the west,” but another broody, melancholic moment in a movie filled with melancholy.

Earp learns that the criminal he saved died a few years later in some other criminal scheme. And as the young man leaves Wyatt turns to Josephine and says, “Some people say it didn’t happen that way.” 

She replies, “Don’t listen to them. It happened that way.” 

Is this an accurate representation of Wyatt Earp and how he felt about his life? I dunno. But what I will tell you is that even though I enjoy Wyatt Earp (the movie), I also know why it was a box office bomb. Ain’t nobody standing in the aisles cheering at that ending. 

Here’s how Tombstone handles the standoff. 

First off all, Tombstone loves these stand-offs and does them to one extent or another three or four times in a two-hour movie. What is that back and forth between Johnny Ringo’s pistols and Doc Holliday’s little coffee cup if not an amusing standoff between deadly men? 

But the first official RMS is between Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp and Billy Bob Thornton’s Johnny Tyler. And before we get too far into it, we must give credit to Tombstone’s casting director, Lora Kennedy, because every role in this thing is played perfectly. I can’t tell you most of the main cast in Wyatt Earp, but I can tell you the names and character moments of almost everyone in Tombstone, including people who only got one or two lines. 

Anyway, Johnny Tyler is a loud bully. Earp sizes him up, walks over to him at a card table, berates him, dares him to pull a gun, and smacks him around until the confrontation is mostly over. 

Later, Tyler grabs a shotgun and heads into the street (presumably to kill Earp) when he sees Doc Holliday, gets spooked, and is told to leave the shotgun and, embarrassed and humbled, gives up and walks away.

You know what this is? This is a ton of fun. 

As the kids might say, Wyatt has so much aura that people just drop their guns, even though they’ve got him at point-blank range, because they know they’ll be killed by a legend.

Is that true? Is that even possible? Who cares? It’s wonderful cinema.

There’s a lot of “who cares cause this looks or sounds awesome” in Tombstone. And precious little of it in Wyatt Earp.

For instance, a house is on fire behind them when the Earps walk down the street to the OK Corral. Why? Cause it looks cool. Also in that scene, Earp’s future wife is dressed either like the devil or death for some sort of photo. Why? Cause it looks cool. 

There is a dang montage of good guys killing bad guys at the end of the film. It’s ridiculous. But it’s also dope.

It’s a movie filled with scenes and asides that make little sense but are so wonderful that you never stop to consider whether any of it could possibly happen in the real world. Who the heck wants to live in the real world anyway?

The second Righteous Mexican Standoff in Tombstone happens when Wyatt takes Curly Bill Brocius into custody after Brocious kills Marshall Fred White in the street. Wyatt is confronted by some townspeople who want to hang Brocious and by Ike Clanton and the Clanton gang, who want to free him. 

Wyatt freezes this situation by placing his gun directly between Clanton’s eyes. 

“You die first, get it? Your friends might get me in a rush, but not before I make your head into a canoe, you understand me?”

You have to see the look on Clanton’s face (played by Stephen Lang!) to really get this next part, but it is hilarious. One of the others states that Wyatt’s bluffing.

“No. He ain’t bluffin’,” Ike Clanton says, trembling. 

“You’re not as stupid as you look, Ike,” Wyatt replies. 

And that’s it. Murderous lynch mob called off on account of one crazy person with a gun. 

Again, there’s nothing at all like this in Wyatt Earp. He mostly knocks out people from behind before things get out of hand. And that is, I suspect, as true to the real-life Wyatt Earp as possible. Earp didn’t survive the Old West by daring people to draw their guns and relying on his personal magnetism to block the bullets. He survived by efficiently turning the lights out on anyone who might have a weapon who dared look at him crossways or with ill intent.

In fact, there is a whole section of Wyatt Earp that explains that everything the heroes of Tombstone do is wrong and stupid.

‘He’s Affable’

Wyatt Earp takes the time to show us how Wyatt Earp met Bat and Ed Masterson first as buffalo hunters, and then he takes them under his wing as lawmen. 

Wyatt lets Bat and Ed disarm some men, and when Ed talks too long, Wyatt knocks out the men. Ed protests, claiming that he was about to talk them down, and Wyatt points out that one of them had a small gun concealed and ready to use. He tells Bat that he has the right instincts for the work and urges Ed to go into something else. 

“Politics, maybe.” 

Why? Cause if he stays in law enforcement, he’s going to get himself and the people around him killed. 

“You’re not a deliberate man, Ed,” Wyatt says. “I don’t sense that about you. You’re too affable.” 

Wyatt Earp is such a deliberate movie that affability comes up exactly two more times, fulfilling the rule of three.

The second is during a conversation after Wyatt has lost his job and the city has given it to Ed Masterson instead because Wyatt is unpopular (some of the townfolk are surely tired of getting hit on the head every time they get out of line.)

A bartender casually asks Wyatt how his life is going, and he explains that he doesn’t have his job anymore and that Ed took over. 

“What’s he like?” 

“He’s affable,” Wyatt replies. 

The word affable is not directly stated in the third reference. But we do see Ed Masterson being quite the affable guy and talking to some drunks in his people-pleasing way right up until he is shot and killed. 

This scene is one of the best examples of what Wyatt Earp is trying to accomplish. Essentially, everyone is getting together to try and win Kevin Costner another Oscar.

Well, no, not exactly, but every scene is dedicated to trying to explain the actions and decision of the real life, historical Wyatt Earp.    

So why does Wyatt try to keep his brothers together for so long? Because his daddy, Gene Hackman, told him that nothing counts so much as blood. Why is he cold to his second wife? Cause his first wife died on him while she was pregnant, and he can’t let himself love someone like that again.

It’s a movie that concerns itself with even the details of Wyatt’s choice in beverages. After his first wife died, Wyatt became a drunk and nearly got himself killed. After his dad gets him right again, he is always noticeably drinking coffee.  

Tombstone is a fantasy action film with a revenge plot at the end. Wyatt Earp is a serious-minded account of a real historical figure. 

Unfortunately, Wyatt Earp as a person is too taciturn to entertain a movie audience. He isn’t really a joy to be around in Tombstone either — although he is a bit more affable. 

But Tombstone lets us get to know everyone. Here, you can enjoy Doc Holliday’s delicious threats, Sam Elliot’s (Virgil Earp) cowboy earnestness, and Dana Delany’s romantic struggles. 

Also, Powers Boothe, Michael Beihn, and Stephen Lang become the living embodiment of smug evil, insane evil, and cowardly evil.   

Powers Boothe is so good at being evil; he can portray it just by sticking his tongue out at some point in every scene. You want to shoot him the moment you see him and before he ever says a word. That little laugh of his is wicked too; it makes you wish you could remove his teeth with your fists. 

A Reckoning

You could make an argument that the reason Tombstone became the winner in this round of Hollywood doubles is because of Val Kilmer. It isn’t just that he has the best lines and that Kurt Russell was generous enough to let Kilmer run with the ball. That’s part of it for sure. 

Anyone can make a scene like this work: 

One guy says you can’t shoot me, you are so drunk you’re probably seeing double, and the other guy replies, “I have two guns, one for each of you.” 

But that Val Kilmer’s dry southern delivery works in every moment. On the page, nothing about Doc’s confrontation with a man who accuses him of cheating jumps out at you. 

But on the screen …

“Why, Ed, does this mean we’re not friends anymore? You know, Ed, if I thought you weren’t my friend… I just don’t think I could bear it.”

If you have seen the movie, I guarantee you read that line in Kilmer’s remarkable Doc Holliday voice. Such is the power of his performance. 

At one point, Wyatt walks into a hail of bullets and does a miraculous bit of gun slinging after he is ambushed by a group of killers. No bullet can touch him, and meanwhile, he kills every villain nearby. 

Later, someone asks Doc Holiday where Wyatt has gone. 

“Down by the creek, walking on water.”

But Tombstone doesn’t stop at Doc because every character is fully drawn. From the two characters (Jason Priestley’s Billy Breckinridge and Billy Zane’s Mr. Fabian) who are having a relationship (off-screen … it was the 1990s) to Michael Rooker’s Sherman McMasters, whose face in his first scenf suggests that his ultimate fate will be to abandon his life of crime and follow the straight and narrow. 

Everyone in Tombstone has an inner life, and they are following their own individual stories. We don’t see more than glimpses of them, but those glimpses help turn the whole movie into something more than shoot-em-up. 

On the other hand, there is nothing in Tombstone quite so cinematic or symbolic as Kevin Costner’s young Wyatt Earp holding a gun up to the sky for the first time while a hail of fireworks goes off behind him.  

Wyatt Earp is a movie that feels like it should play in a theater from a time when everyone got dressed up to go to the cinema. Tombstone feels like the first half of a drive-in double feature. The best drive-in double feature you might ever be lucky enough to see, but my point stands. 

As I reckon with both movies, I can tell you that Tombstone stands strong and would probably win in any reasoned debate on the merits. 

But I still hold a place for Wyatt Earp. For I am a man in middle age and I understand what it is like to look back with melancholy at all your decisions and wonder which of them were right and if any of them doomed your soul.   

This phrase is both true and chilling: I would do anything for my kids. 

As a parent I can confirm this. If my child needed a body buried I would grab a shovel and get to work. 

Love is not rational. 

Director Park Chan Wok and novelist Donald Westlake know what’s up. They don’t just know about parents and children they know about how much of ourselves, our identity is tied up in our work. 

However, the job will never love you back. 

In No Other Choice a father takes it to the limit, seeing murder as the only solution to his unemployment. As the only way to stop the very real and severe pain his unemployment is causing his family. 

Of course, there is always a price to pay. This is capitalism and there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. 

It seems like I saw Hitchcock say that people don’t understand just how hard it can be to murder someone. 

We see murder all the time on television and in movies. But in Hitchcock’s films it was almost always messy and problematic. This is a movie that innately understands that. 

I’m not sure there is any modern filmmaker who is as close to a Hitchcock’s unique visual flair and superhuman ability to build tension as Park. 

The guy can take downing a mug of beer and turn it into an event. And what he does with murder is unique and rightly disturbing. 

According to IMDB Park believed this would be his masterpiece. I’ll let you weigh in on that. For me, I don’t think this clears Oldboy, a movie with a bar so high it would be almost impossible to overcome.

Regardless, while I didn’t see No Other Choice until 2026, it’s almost certainly one of the best movies of 2025. 

An older man for reasons known only to him takes a young man who is on his last leg under his wing. 

He shows him how to live the life of a gambler. It is not, let’s say, very romantic. But the old man (Philip Baker Hall) has a certain style and gravity and presence that’s lacking in young men everywhere. 

A cocktail waitress calls him Captain. That name is a lot closer to the truth than his given sobriquet of Sydney. 

We see the young man, (John C Reilly) respects this new mentor and begins to emulate him. 

And then, well, life can take some turns man. 

Hard Eight was written and directed by then first time director Paul Thomas Anderson in 1996. It really doesn’t suggest what Anderson’s movies would become.

The deep pain and longing and need for connection is there, certainly. But they are wrapped in low rent and low budget sort of crime film. 

I wonder if he could have gotten the budget if the setting would have been more glamorous. I doubt it because none of these players are meant to be high rollers.  

I watched Hard Eight years ago and watched it again tonight as I psych myself up and get ready for One Battle After Another. 

IMDB claims that Anderson doesn’t talk about this movie all that often except to say that he didn’t understand back then how he needed to make the relationships between a director and his producer work to get what he wanted. 

The movie was allegedly taken from him and the producer was going to cut it shorter. But Anderson won out when the flick got accepted into Cannes. 

From the outside and knowing what we know now it’s hard to argue that anyone but Anderson should have the Final Cut on his movies. But consider that Anderson really wanted to call this flick “Sydney.” 

That’s maybe the correct name for this film while also being a terrible name for a movie you want people to pay money to see. 

This is probably the definition of a slow burn or maybe the first half of it is just required to be slow. The second half picks up nicely and features several violent crimes and at least one or two all timer “tough guy” lines. 

But don’t misunderstand because this is not what I would call a tough guy flick. Even back at the beginning Anderson would never let a character be anything other than a rounded human being. That rules out most of the archetypes required to make a revenge picture or a crime picture actually work. 

What we end up with is unique people placed in a few extraordinary circumstances. 

A crime picture that doubles as a character study. 

It works. I liked it. But I’m also very glad that Anderson found his groove on his next go round.

Watching The Killer again, this time on Tubi, though I really need to buy it. 

Ok so this is always overshadowed in my mind by Hard Boiled (the greatest action movie of the 1990s) but The Killer might be better. 

The love story is stronger, the connection between the killer and the cop is better and the action sequences … I had forgotten how amazing they are. 

I think Chow Yun Fat looks cooler throughout Hard Boiled than he does here and that is a factor. I don’t think anyone looks as cool on screen as the characters in Hong Kong crime films in the late 80s and early 90s. 

The guys in Heat, and Collateral are ice cold and sharp of course maybe and Al and his crew in Godfather 1 and 2 could rival the cops and gangsters from Hong Kong but, really, there’s nobody else who looks this stylish.

I wasn’t prepared for how good Danny Lee is here. He’s the real heart of this thing and he carries it magnificently. 

Also, John Woo’s camera prowls around like a hungry lion and everytime Chow Yun Fat flies backwards while simultaneously firing two guns I’m thrilled in a way that I can hardly find in any other sort of flick.

Woo had a pretty good Hollywood career that included the high point of Face/Off but what he accomplished in his home country remains unmatched. And not just unmatched by his own work but also by nearly everyone else who imitated his style but couldn’t fly this close to the sun.

That Elmore Leonard thing is hard. 

Caught Stealing is a serviceable entry in the crime genre. It’s got two, maybe three, really solid twists some interesting characters and once it starts moving it stays near the strike zone. 

It definitely strives for that Elmore Leonard intersection of cool characters, crime mayhem and comedy. 

I liked it but I didn’t love it though. First, the tone just shifts way too much. Is this a Hitchcockian thriller? You know, the wrong man caught up in a world of violence he doesn’t understand? 

Is it a caper film? Is it a comedy? Is it about a man atoning for his biggest sin? 

Unfortunately, it’s all of those things and a couple of more besides. 

There is a plot turn really early on that sucked all the energy out of the proceedings. Then a twist a few scenes later kind of brought everything back and gave Regina King a better role. 

BUT Spoiler: 

Zoe Kravitz character, our protagonist’s girlfriend gets killed. 

I don’t think the movie ever recovered from this and I think Aronofsky and screenwriter Charlie Huston should have done something else. Easy for me to say, I suppose. There are plenty of arguments to do it and it drives the movie forward and gives us a nice twist near the end. Also, there is something unique about Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson continually getting his friends killed throughout the proceedings. 

But the time and place for such a thing is in revenge movies. And instead of Butler’s phenom baseball player stalking the guys who killed his girl with a bat he spends most of the movie trying not to get shot. 

Again, killing the girl works in a different movie, maybe, but not the one where Matt Smith is playing a punk straight of central casting and complete with a Mohawk, a leather jacket and an inability to discharge an uzi properly. 

Her death and my belief that they should have just put her in a coma so she could come back at the end reminded me of two classic movie moments. 

The first is that Director Tony Scott overruled then screenwriter Quentin Tarantino who wanted Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley dead by the end of True Romance. 

Tarantino is a movie genius but Scott was absolutely right to let Clarence and his lover Alabama escape all that violence and ride off into the sunset together. 

The second thing was that in Stephen King’s Misery, evil Annie actually cuts poor Paul Sheldon’s feet clean off. In the movie she break’s his feet at the ankles. So at the end, when James Caan survives you see him walking with a cane. Broken perhaps but not completely changed. 

Screenwriter William Goldman argued that a book audience would be fine with poor Paul losing his feet and a movie audience would have never forgiven the filmmakers or the flick itself if the main character as permanently disfigured. 

I’m telling you, put Zoe in a coma and have her come back in the last reel on the beach with our hero and you got movie magic. Instead, you got, a noir story perhaps, a movie about a guy losing everything. 

Except it’s just not quite that either. This movie is a single, maybe a double but it’s nowhere close to a home run. 

Anyway, Regina King is great, and I liked seeing Leiv Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio even if they don’t get enough screen time. 

It’s a wonderful to see Griffin Dunne and Carol Kane even if they only get one scene a piece. 

Everyone is cooking but the meal never quite satisfies. It’s happens that way something’s. Elmore Leonard wrote 45 novels but in the end Hollywood only made three perfect movies from his life’s work. 

This is no Get Shorty. But it’s a damn sight better than Be Cool.

I was a young teenager when Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo, showed up on comic book shelves. I was a voracious reader but here was something completely unlike anything I had ever encountered. 

Jonah was a western anti-hero created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga in 1972. I don’t think anyone could argue that he was maybe one or two steps removed from Clint Eastwood’s poplar movie screen persona as the Man with No Name. 

By the 1990s there no western heroes on the stand but Two Gun Mojo, written by Joe R. Lansdale with art by Timothy Truman started a mini revival of the genre. Lansdale and Truman reimagined Hex a bit and gave him supernatural villians and the book was, for a short time, the coolest thing on the stands. 

The whole thing didn’t last long but Lansdale built a career that included books, and television and movies. 

Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, once said (I think) that his wife wanted him to just create something normal. Just draw superheroes or create a normal story and the cash will keep rolling in. Mignola, instead, created a hell creature that fought other hell creatures. Mignola later said (essentially) that he couldn’t do normal. As a writer and an artist his brain just wouldn’t work that way. 

I think that applies to Lansdale as well. I mean, his biggest cultural hit was, for a time, Bubba Ho Tep. A book and later a movie (written and directed by Don Coscarelli) that posits that all those National Enquirer stories were true and Elvis never died, and he was now being stalked by a mummy while trying to live out his final days in a nursing home. 

It was a minor hit and celebrated in the kind of fan circles I traveled in in 2002. But that was never going to be a a huge thing. Nobody was going to retire on their Bubba Ho Tep money. 

His other successful stab at all of this is the Hap and Leonard book series. Eventually that was made into three seasons of television on The Sundance Network. A riveting crime show and frequently on critics best of the year of list. 

But, consider the internet description of two main characters: Hap Collins, “a white working class laborer who spent time in federal prison as a young man for refusing to be drafted into the military and serve in the Vietnam War.” 

His best friend is Leonard Pine, “a gay black Vietnam vet with serious anger issues.” Together they solve mysteries and fight crime. 

Again, Lansdale has, as near as I can tell, built a nice career for himself with this and his other books. 

But my goodness, much as I love this stuff, I would have to admit it’s an acquired taste. 

While I’m rambling and before I go further let’s also recommend Cold in July a neo-western based on a Lansdale book and starring Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. You probably never saw it but it’s a cool slice of crime fiction. 

Anyway, having proved my Lansdale bonifides and noting that I am always interested in his work even I didn’t make it to the theater last year to see The Thicket. 

It was only in theaters for a few weeks, with no advertisements, and when I found it I couldn’t make the hour drive to the big nearby city to catch it. I got kids man. 

It’s now on Amazon Prime and most of it is exceptional. Exactly the kind of tough talk and bloody mindedness you want in a movie where Peter Dinklage plays an old west bounty hunter. 

As an actor he always delivers and here he gets to be a cowboy who reluctantly helps a young man (Levon Hawke) rescue his sister who was kidnapped by Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis). Dinklage’s reluctance is more less based on a pretty good western trope. To paraphrase: “You haven’t seen violence, boy, and I have and it should be avoided at all costs.” 

You know, that thing. As motivations go it’s a winner. 

The other, is that the pay won’t be worth the risk. Again to paraphrase: “I might risk my life for something, but it won’t be some woman I don’t know and one third of $300.”

That was another excellent bit of business. 

When we meet Dinklage’s character someone is trying to make fun of his height and cheat him out of money owed. You can guess how that conflict ends.

Meanwhile, Cut Throat Bill is mostly off in her own little movie doing an excellent job at being menacing, creepy and crazy. I suspect Juliet Lewis spent some time watching Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh. 

It’s a movie that falls into a particular category for me which is: if this is the kind of thing you like then I think you will like this thing. 

It succeeds and I enjoyed it but I would also tell you it has modest ambitions. A decent exercise in genre work that squeezes some fun out of Dinklage and Lewis being old west killers.

The movie cooks a bit when we hear a sermon from a doomed priest explaining Cut Throat Bill’s backstory. And again when her part of the tale concludes. Her final words in the movie is haunting.

So the movie gets to a really top shelf sort of place. But it doesn’t get there often and it doesn’t stay there.

Spoiler below: 

The conclusion follows through with the warnings about how all this violence will end. And what the pursuit of righteousness in the face of evil might cost. 

Ultimately, we are presented with a happy ending … for the survivors.

If they had hired a real actor to play Ian Holm’s character this would have been a solid Alien entry. 

Doing it with CGI brings nothing to the table. If someone was making Godfather 2 today they would de-age Marlon Brando and DeNiro’s once in a lifetime performance as young Vito would be lost to the world. 

What I’m trying to say is that the ghost in the machine threw me out of this film just as it was starting to cook. 

Quit doing this. 

The rest of this is fine. I’m not sure there’s any more meat on the bone for Alien as a franchise. The repeat of a famous phrase from the franchise in this flicks’ climax kind of proves the point. 

But my interest in this and predator was never very strong. Make a good one and I’ll see it eventually. Make a bad one and it’s pretty much the same thing.

The final section of the movie had our heroine battling the final boss and her ship’s levers which all have to be pulled so that she can do a thing which will save her and kill it. Two sci-fi movie classics come to mind. A sequence in Galaxy Quest where the viewers discover the space ship is very complicated for no reason at all.

And this classic line from Spaceballs. 

“Even in the future nothing works!”

We have officially entered an era where we are replacing jokey fun with sincerity.

One the one hand this is about as good a movie as you could ever hope for for the Fantastic Four. On the other, like Superman, the characters carried so much baggage from four previous bites at the silver screen and a 60 year publishing history that this movie is swinging wildly in a new (and old) direction. 

It’s strange to be in 2025 and watch something built on nostalgia for the 1960s but, again, of the available options this is probably the right one. 

I think it was also a wise decision to turn most of the FF’s supervillains into either flash frame notes or flat out jokes, like the Mole Man. Would I have enjoyed three hour movie where you see the FF take on and defeat three or four of their biggest villains in 15 minute segments before getting to the Galactus main course? You bet! 

But I’m not sure The Wizard or The Red Ghost is going to hold the attention of a general audience. A Paste-Pot Pete section tho … could have moved the needle. 

Director Matt Shakman and a team of writers find a somewhat new way into the Galactus story even though it’s been done once on screen already and variations of it have been done in the comics since Stan and Jack delivered it in the 1960s. 

When the central conflict was introduced I thought that the movie was on solid ground. 

As I said about Superman I could show someone First Steps and tell them that this is mostly what a Fantastic Four comic felt like. Although only the Jack Kirby and Stan Lee ones. Almost anything that was invented after issue 100 is ignored. 

And while whole sections of the MCU are built on his art and ideas this is the first real tribute and attempt at bringing a Jack Kirby joint to the screen. Galactus looks appropriately godlike and Kirbyesque. And that future Kirby tech and retrofuture design is all over the place. 

FF and Superman show Hollywood taking the material as it is instead of thinking they know better than the people who came up with the stories that captured the hearts and minds of readers for generations. 

Finally, when you do put kid Franklin in an FF uniform it does not say Fantastic 5. His shirt says 4 1/2. 

Let’s get the big things right guys.

“We’re designed more for public than for private.”

This reminds me of professional wrestling. The thing about wrestling is that for decades people were satisfied to take it mostly at face value. Not so much that the audience believed it to be real but that they enjoyed it for the stage show production that it was. 

A simple morality play, more or less, about a little guy (like you) who stands up and usually defeats a bully. 

But in the 1990s real life and the internet intruded into the proceedings and the audiences and the performers started co-existing in a different way. With winks and nods from the performers fans were asked to believe that while other parts of the show were fake this storyline was real. 

Stone Cold was fighting his real life boss (Vince McMahon really did own the WWE) and backstage politics really were holding some of the wrestlers at WCW back. 

This played out in major storylines that purported to be real. 

Of course, the thing about wrestling watching a wrestling show, a movie or reality TV is that it’s all a work. It’s all fake and even the stuff that has a kernel of truth is just grist for the mill. 

It was a thought that never left me as I watched Postcards From The Edge.  The movie is based on a novel written by Carrie Fisher, about her life as a movie star and a drug addict. The film centers on Fisher’s relationship with her famous mother, Debbie Reynolds. 

Here’s a key line: 

“You don’t want me to be a singer. You’re the singer. You’re the performer. I can’t possibly compete with you. What if somebody won?”

So the movie purports to show us life as a Hollywood actress with an overbearing movie star mom. Much of this, I didn’t really believe. 

Some of it, surely, comes from real life events and conversations. The mom being accosted by fans while trying to visit the daughter in rehab has got to be a true story. Right? 

However, drug addiction has never seemed so mild and alcoholism so controlled. OD’s don’t usually look that good when they arrive at the hospital. 

Fisher’s love life is a disaster and her mother is crazy but at the end everyone comes to an understanding and there is a handsome doctor waiting in the wings. 

It has this sheen of being too cute. Some scenes feel like they are required by the rules of screenwriting, the executive producer or the test audience. 

Which, again, is nonsense. Because I have no idea what’s real and what isn’t. It’s just that some of it feels real and some of it doesn’t. 

One little fact I enjoy is that Fisher’s book, apparently, hardly featured her famous mom at all. 

And yet, Debbie Reynolds — movie star — would not be denied.